Anaphora
by olivemonkey
Summary: "I prayed to you, Cas. Every night." "I know." Castiel has been in Purgatory for less than five minutes the first time he hears Dean praying to him. Spoilers through 8x02.


1.

Castiel has been in Purgatory for less than five minutes the first time he hears Dean praying to him. He's racing through the woods, flickering from place to place (when he manages to remember how to do that) and simply running full tilt (when he doesn't). There are three, five, eight Leviathan on the chase, he's running for his life, and Dean's voice almost brings him to his knees in the middle of it all.

"_Cas, where are you? Cas! We got a forest full of monsters out here and you just break ranks? I thought you used to be a soldier – what kind of a soldier does that? Castiel, you idiot child! Seriously, can I not take my eyes off you for one damn—"_

And then nothing. It's enough to yank at the already-frayed edges of Castiel's sanity, and he is sent spinning into chaos, the same wearying river in which he has already spent so much of the past year submerged. He trips over the tangled roots of a tree, staggers first one way and then the other. He doesn't know which way to go and so it is that he runs headlong into the waiting arms of Leviathan.

He's on the ground and the Leviathan has her – its? – fingers locked into his jaw and she is twisting, intent on ripping his face in two, by the time Castiel finds it in himself to fight back. There is something he's supposed to live for, though he can't quite seem to find a solid grip on just what that is right now. His fingers scrabble in the dirt and close around a stone. The Leviathan's head cracks unpleasantly on contact, but it's not enough: Castiel strikes again and again, until her skull is nothing more than a tarry pulp, and still her bloodied hands are blindly reaching for his throat. He throws her aside and takes off again through the endless woods, and he no longer remembers what he was running to (or was it from?) but he keeps running anyway, and his pounding heartbeat does not begin to fill the silence ringing in his head.

2.

The second night, Castiel is huddled beneath a sycamore tree when Dean's voice finds him, and the sound of it fills him with relief – the release of a breath he had forgotten he was holding. His sense of well-being is short-lived, quickly erased by the tenor of Dean's thoughts. Dean's idea of prayer has never been particularly devout, but tonight's edition in particular is less of a prayer and more a litany of anger.

"_Cas, god damn it. Can you hear me out there? Castiel, where are you, you son of a bitch? Aren't we supposed to be in this together? You get your feathery tail over here and you get my back, god damn you! You can't leave me to this, Cas – you can't leave me to take on Purgatory alone!"_

"It's better for you to be alone than dead," Castiel says to the empty air, before remembering that unlike the reverse, Dean isn't able to hear Castiel's prayers. Castiel isn't sure if that's a blessing or a curse. What could he say that Dean would want to hear? What could he tell Dean that would make the man listen? He draws his coat tighter around his chest and pretends anyway, rocking back and forth against the ageless tree trunk and explaining to a man who can't and won't hear him: wherefore, and why, and how very, very sorry.

3.

On the third day, Castiel kneels beside the corpse of the shifter soul that he has just killed. The remainder of a remainder – much like Castiel. Too much like, and too easy to kill, these monsters – not like Leviathan. A touch, the application of the slightest bit of willpower. The laying on of hands used to be a sacrament, once. Well. No one steps into the same river twice.

Castiel doesn't like killing them, the shifters and vampires and werewolves, whatever they are, whatever he is now. He wonders what happens to the souls of angels when they die, for it isn't to Heaven or Hell or Purgatory that they go; not that he has ever heard of, at least. God made man from dust (in an extremely allegorical and roundabout sort of way), but what did He make His first children from, and what will they return to? Is Castiel just so much dust made animate, and then, one day, inanimate again? And is that fair? Death seems to be too simple of a release for the things he's done, the things he's seen … Maybe God would see things differently, maybe God could and would forgive him and maybe God could say yes, Castiel, you tried, it's finished now and you can be done; and maybe Castiel would have listened if He had. But God is not here and Castiel is going to have to make his way on his own. As so many times before.

It is in this black mood that Dean's prayer finds its ways to Castiel, where he sits beside the monster he has killed like a relative sitting shiva. Today's is much harder to handle than Dean's anger of the night before: _"Cas, please don't be dead. Are you listening? Don't be dead, you son of a bitch. I can't lose you too. Not to this place. Not now. I just can't. Okay? Cas, please?"_

Castiel almost goes to him right then and there. It would be so easy – too easy – but he manages to pull the fractured pieces of himself together. Not all the way, but enough: enough to say no, to himself as much as to Dean. This enforced separation is for Dean's benefit. He thinks about praying back again, but the idea has lost its allure by the harsh light of what passes in Purgatory for day. Instead he drags himself to his feet, wipes his bloody hands on his coat, and stumbles away from the remains of the shifter soul. He sets out with no goal or destination, walking toward the father he will never find, walking away from the friend he's not allowed to keep. _My life is a circle_, he thinks, because circles also don't get to have an ending.

4.

Every night. _Every_ night. It's a peculiar sort of Spanish water torture, endless raindrops drumming down onto Castiel's ears, but. _But_. It's better, so much better, than the alternative. What would he do if the prayers stopped one night? He has re-assembled himself (as best he could with what shards are left) but if the last line he has to the life he once knew were to go silent, he suspects there would be no slowing the slide back into madness.

And so Dean prays every night. Dean prays for companionship, for a word of response, for a shoulder to lean on when the times are bad (and they are always bad, always). Dean prays for a word, just one word to let him know Cas is all right and out there somewhere, is _one damn word _so much to ask? Dean prays for forgiveness for not being there, for not asking how the war was going until it was too late, for not refusing to listen when Cas said everything was fine, just fine, _Cas, when did you learn to lie to me so well?_ He prays that there's a way out of this, he prays that he's not going mad and just talking to himself, was there ever even a Castiel at all or is he an invention of Dean's to cope with Purgatory, to have something to work toward and not just an aimless, endless existence here? Castiel knows all too well the familiar refrains of slipping sanity, but he believes, has to believe, that Dean will put out of this tailspin, because Castiel has done it and Dean was always the stronger of the two of them.

But every night he's battered beneath Dean's waterfall of words, and every night he must choose once more to stay away, to continue on the path he's chosen. He's doing the right thing for Dean – isn't he? He must be, because it hurts so much.

5.

The one time he would have rushed to Dean's side when the prayer rolls in, and he can't, he can't go to his friend, the will is there but there is no way, none at all.

He's lying in the shadow of the same sycamore tree – or is it a different one, it's so hard to tell, he can never tell here where he's going or where he has been – and he's holding his own guts in with his hands. Leviathan had meant to take him apart and had very nearly succeeded. _Had_ succeeded, at least in some measure. Maybe he should have let them. Maybe then it could have been over … but then he shudders as he pictures himself as either angel-dust absorbed slowly into the soil of Purgatory – or resurrected again on Earth – and either way the story ends (or doesn't) Dean is left here and truly alone.

And then the prayers begin.

"_Cas, buddy … I need you. Really. I can't – I'm hurt, Cas, and it's, uh. It's not good. Think I'm bleeding out … I think …"_

Castiel has rolled over on his side before the wisp of a prayer has flickered out. One arm keeps intestines from spilling out onto the ground, while the other reaches out to drag his battered body along. Healing himself is a task with a magnitude too great to even contemplate, as drained as he is now, but a human body is so much less, that fragile shell meant to house a soul; _how do they do it_, Castiel wonders, _how do they hold so much with so little?_ If he could find Dean – and no, there is no question of _could_, he _has to_ find Dean now, there's no question at all, and maybe it was foolish ever to think they could do this alone –

He wakes up, some hours or days later, with his head on his outstretched arm and the slash in his belly starting to heal. He lies still, curled around the raw wound, waiting for the night, and yes, thank God or thank goodness or thank whatever power or chance that exists, there is a prayer tonight and Dean's thoughts are stronger this time as he curses Castiel's name for a traitor and a coward and a fool.

6.

"Cas."

This time is different and Castiel doesn't understand why at first. The prayer is so simple. Just his name: Cas. But the tenor, the texture of it. He hears it as much as he feels it, and his stomach sinks suddenly – an all too human sensation. "Dean?" he asks, and looks around, and the man is standing right there, expectantly. But what is it that he's expecting? Castiel has nothing to offer but sorrow and suffering.

This is wrong, this is all wrong. Castiel stands up cautiously, for his feet have fallen off the path once again and perhaps they always will, or perhaps he was wrong this time too and he was never really even on the path at all. The world drops out from underneath him as Dean walks down along the rocky shore and embraces him like the prodigal son gone astray and brought safely home again, once lost and now found and still not sure, never quite sure, what to do with the grace he has been granted once more without desert.


End file.
